“The Old South never really went away,” the ex-president’s spectral presence sadly acknowledged, his gaunt face unchanged by more than a century of celestial joy.

“Let’s face it, Reconstruction turned out to be a sham. My assassination and the crooked election of 1876 gave the racists all they needed to bring back everything through the rear door.

“And they did, via Jim Crow laws and practices, until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.”

[Ed. note: In 1876, northern Republican Rutherford B. Hayes lost to southern Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. In a backroom deal, however, Hayes became president anyway, after agreeing to keep the Feds out of Southern politics, thus ushering in the era of Jim Crow.]

Mr Lincoln said that despite the gains of the 1960s, southern whites today still view black men and women as loose slaves who need to be beaten down or lynched.

The former president added that even before Trump the racists, corporatists and Christian hypocrites had successfully rolled back many New Deal and Great Society programs, while re-injecting “the old fetid cancer of their vicious racism into US politics.”

“Only the technology has changed,” Honest Abe honestly observed. “In my day, they strung up black men from the nearest tree. Now they just gun them down in the streets and claim they felt threatened.

“‘Fuck your breath,’ remember that? From a US policeman to the man he was choking to death. In heaven,” Lincoln glanced over his shoulder, “the angels are still weeping.”

Mr Lincoln said that Americans should recognize that the Union had irredeemably failed. New England and west coast states like California and Oregon should allow the south’s racists “to take their bloody Confederate flag and cook themselves to death in a cauldron of their own steaming violence and xenophobic hatred.”

He added: “You can bet all their liberal blacks, Jews and Catholics will hurry north in droves, leaving those barely human animals no one to hate or kill except themselves.

“And good riddance. Let ’em shoot each other down while praying to Jesus. Up here that’s one of the Almighty’s grimmest standing jokes, let me assure you.”

The former president said that “the civilized part” of the old USA should seek a union with Canada instead. The new country might call itself the United States of Canadia.